WBZ Cares: Christmas In The City Aims to Help Homeless Kids In Need

BOSTON (CBS) – The WBZ Cares Campaign continues for the month of December.

Each month, WBZ NewsRadio 1030 highlights a worthy non-profit organization and tells the story of what it does for the community.

For the month of December , WBZ profiles “Christmas In The City,” a 100% volunteer, non-profit organization dedicated to helping relieve the impact of homelessness and poverty on Boston-area children and their families

Each year “plays Santa” to thousands of children who are currently living in homeless shelters.

Founder Jake Kennedy and his wife Sparky started “Christmas in the City” 28-years ago when they saw how many toys their kids were getting for Christmas, and thought, what about those kids who are not so lucky.

“Well, it probably started when my wife and I were concerned about how many presents our children were receiving. Like we would give them “X” number of presents for Christmas. But the relatives would descend upon the house for the next two or three days and shower them with presents and we said this is not working,” Kennedy said. we just came up with the idea, let’s find some kids who don’t get any presents.” He said.

“We just came up with the idea, let’s find some kids who don’t get any presents.” he said.

They started working with other local organizations to find homeless families.

“We found 165 children in homeless shelters. Mayor Flynn was the Mayor, so we went to the mayor, he said ‘you can use City Hall Plaza,’ and we used City Hall Plaza, and we brought in Santa and each kid was able to sit on Santa’s lap and get his present.”

Christmas in the City was born and has grown, due to an increasing need.

“We now work with every single shelter in Boston, that takes care of homeless families. We now go into the Greater Boston Area also. We take people, you know shelters from Lawrence and from Chelsea and from Quincy and, and we go south and we go north. The need will always be there.” Kennedy said.

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Doug Cope is a reporter/anchor at WBZ, and host of the daily feature “The Parent Report”, which reports on issues involving children and parenting.
Doug has both a broadcasting and public affairs background, having serv...